Artisan Archive

I think crafting, and any profession for that matter, was meant to be a grind. I do like your ideas about getting better schematics. I also have ideas of my own on that matter.

The thread entitled "Loot and Keeping Crafters in the Loop". Please check it out.

You can do it without grinding, if you are really patient. It's find the way it is. IMHO

I would like to see the crafting professions as a whole move away from requiring the infernal amount of pointless grinding. I have a few ideas for ways to achieve advancement aside from going through the motions of clicking your mouse 10000 times crafting 350 useless items. I would also like to suggest that all of my ideas would be optional for advancement so if you're comfortable with 3 hour click sessions to grind that next box -- you're more than welcome.

1. Building your own workshop. This could be like one huge schematic that you get a piece to each time you earn a new box. The pieces should be labor intensive requiring many subcomponents and also require an amount of resources comprable to grinding whatever portion of the xp building the workshop would grant. The workshop would evolve over time, starting as something completely mobile like your generic crafting tool. As you reach higher levels (ie. when you start needing crafting stations) you would start building pieces of equipment as part of the bench in your workshop. The workshop should only grant small bonuses to assembly, experimentation and customization. The point is to be able to work on a large interesting project as opposed to giving yourself carpal tunnel syndrome to get your next box. The workshop crafting should only grant xp one time so you can't build 3 workshops and get your next level. Or to put it better, crafting a certain piece of the workshop should be a flag that gets set to lower the xp requirement for a specific box. You could get a real sense of accomplishment as your unique workshop evolves over time. It wouldn't just be the generic piece of furniture that every other dabler has in their house.

2. Conducting research. This would basically be a set of optional quests you could perform to reduce the xp requirement for a given box. You would have the opportunity to travel tovarious libraries and visit npc masters of the profession to get some small perk. Again just a small gain to assembly, experimentation or customization. Also during the course of your research you would learn some secrets about several of the items that you will earn at the next box. You would spend these secrets by doing experimentation at your workshop.

3. Do actual experimentation in your workshop. Based on how successful you were at creating your workshop and doing your research quests, you would be given a limited number of opportunities to perform real experiments to create an improved schematic. This would be similar to normal crafting except you would select at the outset to perform an experiment. The experiment would cost say 5 times the normal resources. The goal would be to make the best possible item of the type. So of course the smart crafter would take the time to gather his resources carefully before spending one of his precious experimentation attempts. You would be given additional parameters to experament on aside from the ones normally available such as the amount of resources required or maybe one specific attribute of the finished produce. Based on your success at the attempt, you could be awarded a permanent improved version of the schematic which you could produce and sell in the future. On very rare occasions you could have an experimentation breakthrough and discover a unique schematic entirely. The experiments should never be a sure thing. A master artisan should have only 4 or 5improved schematics and maybe 1 unique schematic. These shouldn't be any kind of game breaker, just the slightly better mouse trap to add some flavor and take away the feeling that one artisan is exactly the same as the next.

Obviously my head is way up in the clouds suggesting this one, but wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of richer gameplay than click crafting tool, click resources, click assemble ad-infinitum.

Feedback?